Display a Popup

Add-ons using the techniques described in this document are considered a legacy technology in Firefox. Don't use these techniques to develop new add-ons. Use WebExtensions instead. If you maintain an add-on which uses the techniques described here, consider migrating it to use WebExtensions.

Starting from Firefox 53, no new legacy add-ons will be accepted on addons.mozilla.org (AMO) for desktop Firefox and Firefox for Android.

Starting from Firefox 57, only extensions developed using WebExtensions APIs will be supported on Desktop Firefox and Firefox for Android.

Even before Firefox 57, changes coming up in the Firefox platform will break many legacy extensions. These changes include multiprocess Firefox (e10s), sandboxing, and multiple content processes. Legacy extensions that are affected by these changes should migrate to use WebExtensions APIs if they can. See the "Compatibility Milestones" document for more information.

To follow this tutorial you'll need to have learned the basics of jpm.

To display a popup dialog, use the panel module. A panel's content is defined using HTML. You can run content scripts in the panel: although the script running in the panel can't directly access your main add-on code, you can exchange messages between the panel script and the add-on code.

In this tutorial we'll create an add-on that adds an action button to the toolbar that displays a panel when clicked. The panel just contains a <textarea> element: when the user presses the return key, the contents of the <textarea> is sent to the main add-on code. The main add-on code logs the message to the console.

icon-16.png, icon-32.png, and icon-64.png: icons for the button in three different sizes

The "index.js" looks like this:

var data = require("sdk/self").data;
// Construct a panel, loading its content from the "text-entry.html"
// file in the "data" directory, and loading the "get-text.js" script
// into it.
var text_entry = require("sdk/panel").Panel({
contentURL: data.url("text-entry.html"),
contentScriptFile: data.url("get-text.js")
});
// Create a button
require("sdk/ui/button/action").ActionButton({
id: "show-panel",
label: "Show Panel",
icon: {
"16": "./icon-16.png",
"32": "./icon-32.png",
"64": "./icon-64.png"
},
onClick: handleClick
});
// Show the panel when the user clicks the button.
function handleClick(state) {
text_entry.show();
}
// When the panel is displayed it generated an event called
// "show": we will listen for that event and when it happens,
// send our own "show" event to the panel's script, so the
// script can prepare the panel for display.
text_entry.on("show", function() {
text_entry.port.emit("show");
});
// Listen for messages called "text-entered" coming from
// the content script. The message payload is the text the user
// entered.
// In this implementation we'll just log the text to the console.
text_entry.port.on("text-entered", function (text) {
console.log(text);
text_entry.hide();
});

The content script "get-text.js" looks like this:

// When the user hits return, send the "text-entered"
// message to main.js.
// The message payload is the contents of the edit box.
var textArea = document.getElementById("edit-box");
textArea.addEventListener('keyup', function onkeyup(event) {
if (event.keyCode == 13) {
// Remove the newline.
text = textArea.value.replace(/(\r\n|\n|\r)/gm,"");
self.port.emit("text-entered", text);
textArea.value = '';
}
}, false);
// Listen for the "show" event being sent from the
// main add-on code. It means that the panel's about
// to be shown.
//
// Set the focus to the text area so the user can
// just start typing.
self.port.on("show", function onShow() {
textArea.focus();
});